


incendiary ammunition

by antimateriels



Series: ammunition [2]
Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse)
Genre: "chris redfield navigating the minefield that is leon's marriage" the fic, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Gen, Infidelity, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, there's hetero sex in this but i'm not adding the relationship tag for it because it's...complicated
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-01
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-12 15:39:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29137956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antimateriels/pseuds/antimateriels
Summary: It’s like watching an APIS impact in slowmo – Chris knows it’s gonna leave a crater, but the incendiary charge hasn't ignited yet so he's just waiting for the whole thing to detonate and burst into flames.
Relationships: Chris Redfield & Original Character(s), Leon S. Kennedy/Original Character(s)
Series: ammunition [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2188206
Comments: 7
Kudos: 10





	incendiary ammunition

**Author's Note:**

> Two Trigger-Warnings before going in:
> 
> [1] I tried my best in firing blanks to keep Ranger gender-neutral, but they're gendered (female) in this work.
> 
> [2] Dub-con warning. It's not presented as such in firing blanks, but there's a scene in this fic that Chris interprets as dubious consent. Also generic apologies for the unsexiest smut ever.

**July 2013.**

It’s Wednesday, the butt-end of July, and Chris is baking on the side of the flight-line because the sun is god’s gift to infantry or something like that. Bragg is a depressing swamp on the best of days, all stagnant air, thick-ass humidity, and unrelenting sun. Why the US Army decided to host the majority of their airborne here, he’ll never understand. The only thing that makes Chris knuckle down is the knowledge that Ranger and Piers spent a not-insignificant time based out of this hole. He shudders to think that either liked it, but then, they’re both army brats through and through so it’s a distinct possibility. Chris is waiting for the new ordinance to arrive from Europe for qualification trials. He doesn’t have anyone else to do this for him, so he’s squinting at the loadmasters emptying out yet another C-130 when a familiar figure walks down the ramp.

Chris has to blink twice because Leon’s not supposed to be here. 7 days ago, on the tarmac in Ramstein, Ranger had said they were going home and had said it with this tired, wistful, almost gentle smile. Granted, it was no more than a tilt of her mouth, but Ranger as a rule doesn’t smile. Whether things are going great or going to shit, she somehow manages to hold an unwavering cool equilibrium. Ranger’s just about the most unflappable thing on earth as far as he’s concerned. So Chris had put 2 and 2 together and understood that she wasn’t going back to Bragg, or to the closet in D.C. where she swore up and down BSAA personnel slept during emergencies. No, she was going home; to Leon. She didn’t have to say it, Chris saw that smile and he knew.

Instead of puzzling over what Leon’s doing here right now, Chris raises his hand and calls out Leon’s name. One blond head snaps in his direction, and then moments later, Leon’s standing in front of him.

“Chris,” he says, tentative and tired. He sounds worn to the bone, and not just from the travel.

They haven’t talked since Lanshiang.

There are approximately a metric fuckton of things they need to cover. Chris doesn’t want to have this conversation on the side of the flight-line. He actually would rather not have this conversation at all but Ranger’s one of his, so he pats Leon on the shoulder and says with a stretched grin, “Leon, let’s catch-up.”

Leon says sure. Leon says he has the time and isn’t expected anywhere else which is patently untrue. Look, Chris doesn’t do delicate and he doesn’t do sentimental. He figured out years ago he couldn’t balance a relationship and duty at the same time so he’d sworn off the whole bucket. It’s not that he understands the push and pull of a long-term relationship – it’s only that he thinks of Ranger who is all alone, Ranger who is small enough to probably fit within his two hands, who slips into a berthing with space to spare and takes up approximately 0.5% of the helicopter bay. He thinks of that Ranger, the one who can hit any target within 1500ft between heartbeats rattling alone in a dark apartment waiting, and he thinks, yeah. They’re going to have to talk.

Not about bioweapons, or about the men they’ve lost, or just what the fuck happened back in China. No, they have to talk about the **_Problem_** capital P, italics and bolded. Just thinking about it gets Chris mad because, fuck, this isn’t his problem. He doesn’t go around sticking his fingers into other people’s fucking marriages. Leon’s one of his oldest friends. He doesn’t want to do this. Except Ranger is _his_ and that’s a group that has dwindled exponentially in the past year. Chris knows this is the part of him that she tells him to keep under control – the one that gets too fucking attached to his men and causes shit like post-Edonia meltdowns. Somehow, they both shuffle into his truck and end up at a dive bar just outside the base gates. Chris once had a reputation for always doing what was needed. He isn’t sure if that still holds true, but he’s trying to live up to it.

It takes three beers to get to the point.

“You need to tell her about Ada,” he says in his most supportive voice.

Leon’s head bobs down and he empties his shot. Chris is waiting for some sort of acknowledgement, but the only thing Leon does is raise his hand and call for another shot. Look, the alcohol is cheap here but it isn’t that good. Leon’s going to be smashed to hell and back at this rate which is extremely counterproductive. Chris remembers enough of his interactions with Piers, post 6-month amnesiac bender, to know there’s no getting through to a drunkard.

“You need to tell her about Ada,” Chris says again, this time in his I-am-your-commanding-officer voice.

This seems to get Leon’s attention, but he doesn’t snap back up to attention like Piers used to. He hates the Army-trademark stiffness that’s stamped into Ranger and Piers but he’s starting to miss it right about now. At least Chris knew when he held their undivided attention. Leon’s just staring through him when he replies, “I know”, so Chris doesn’t know at all if this is an actual admission or just a vapid pleasantry designed to halt the conversation.

“Yeah,” Chris says, a bit more sardonic than he intends, “that’s why you’re here instead of back in D.C. You guys left Lanshiang three days before us, so what’re you doing here getting off the Izmir shuttle?”

“Well, I had a detour.”

Leon says this tightly, with a certain furrowed brow. It’s obvious he doesn’t want to say anymore and also equally obvious that Chris is sticking his nose straight into an open sore. Unfortunately for Leon, Chris’ day job involves shooting the brains out of things that used to be human. He’s not afraid of a little gore, metaphorical or otherwise.

Ada Wong is dead as a door-nail. Chris saw her plummet 300ft to the deck of a PLA carrier. But he’s been in this too long to accept anything with certainty so he scrutinizes Leon as if he’ll find the bright red brand of Ada somewhere on him. This only intensifies Leon’s scowl.

“Don’t push anymore Chris. It’s classified, I can’t tell you.”

OPSEC is one hell of a roadblock. It might be a lie, but Leon’s a shitty liar so there’s probably a modicum of truth there. Instead of getting another beer, Chris taps his knuckles against the counter. Once, twice, thrice. This isn’t going anywhere. He needs to approach this from another angle.

“Leon,” he says, sliding back out of commander-mode into something two touches more intimate, “Ranger’s stable. Steady. Like a rock. She’s not like me or you, she doesn’t flame out, she just goes straight to the razor-thin edge between fight or flight and she can stay there for a very long time. The stress makes her a damn good soldier. But you get stuck there too long, you need a way to come back down, right? Or else –”

Chris pauses here, not for dramatic effect, but because he legitimately cannot imagine what the hypothetical Ranger meltdown will look like. Based on what he saw in Lanshiang – Ranger clicking the butt end of her pen, standing catatonic in the carrier’s shadow – he’s going to have to go with death-seeking.

“I know,” Leon says, a bit harder this time.

“Do you?

Leon slams his shot glass down. It’s empty. He half turns in the stool to stare at Chris. In the darkness of the dive bar, his eyes are hard. There’s a brittle line somewhere running through Leon that Chris can’t place – guilt? Jealousy? No fucking clue.

“She has you,” Leon says. He turns back to the bartender to call for another shot. Vodka, this time. “To ground her, to bring her down. And since you’re back, Redfield, I think she’ll be just fine.”

What Chris should do is tell the barkeep that Leon’s had enough and cut him off. But he doesn’t because he’s slack-jawed over Leon’s apparent idiocy. Maybe his hair is blinding him, there’s no other explanation for his sensitivity to this specifically. If you’d asked Chris at any moment in the past 10 years if he thought Leon was the jealous sort, he would have said no way. But even if he were, Leon doesn’t have anything to be jealous of. Chris is always going to have Ranger’s back, that’s the fundamental nature of their relationship. They work together; they deploy together. That’s different. Ranger doesn’t come home to Chris. She doesn’t slacken and smile and start pulling down the walls when she thinks about returning to Chris’ side. That’s not what they have at all. Leon knows that. Or at least, he should.

“If you think it’s me propping her up, you’re just as dumb as she is. And you don’t have the right to be jealous, you know that.”

“Don’t I?” The bitterness in Leon’s voice is enough to curdle milk.

“Ranger’s the best soldier I ever served with, but it came at apparently the third-sense god gave every other woman. If she had two pennies to rub together, she’d be making doe eyes at every other guy on base, take them to bed, and give you a taste of your own medicine.”

Leon stiffens right up and then visibly deflates so Chris knows he’s hit his mark. Partially, he’s regretting not dealing with this earlier. Like say, four years earlier when Ranger had come back from D.C. and mentioned getting married in the future. Chris should have bundled her into the chopper and flown her straight to Africa command and left her there with Sheva or something. There’s plenty in Africa to keep them busy and take someone’s mind off pretty, charming blonds. He’s thinking about Lanshiang, and how, if he’d been just three steps faster and taken the fucking shot –

“You need to tell her about Ada,” Chris says for the third time today, entirely exhausted. “And in person, because she needs you to pull her down and decompress. To anchor her.”

Silence lapses between them, but after a bit, Leon says, “I know.”

It’s said with resignation, not confidence. That more than anything else convinces Chris that he’s made his point loud and clear. What he should do is slap Leon on the back and send him on his way. Mission accomplished. Time to move on. Instead, he calls shots for them both.

Two hours later, and Chris is not letting Leon onto whatever transport he has arranged back to D.C. Ranger’s nose is too fucking good and she’d be able to smell the alcohol, probably fucking ID it too if he sent Leon back now. Chris doesn’t want to put too much value on himself, but he’s pretty sure the combination of “Redfield” and “alcohol” is enough to put Ranger back on high-alert. He remembers how she’d looked at him after Lanshiang like she was wondering if he was going to snap again at any moment. He’s not keen to revisit that so Leon ends up draped over his couch, feet dangling off the ends. Chris has every intention of spending the least amount of time possible in Bragg, so all of the furniture is standard-issue which also means it sucks. He flings a blanket at Leon and aims for his pretty boy face out of spite.

“Remember what I said,” he says seriously.

“I know,” Leon responds as he grabs the blanket, “I never wanted to hurt her.”

Chris doesn’t ask what it was that Leon wanted back when he’d jumped into all this. He’s not sure Leon knows either.

The next morning, they finish off all of the orange juice Chris has in his fridge and grab a depressing plate of fried breakfast meat and poptarts at the mess. Leon’s on the 09:15 shuttle back to Andrews. Chris sees him off at the flight-line. They haven’t rehashed anything from last night, but Leon looks over his shoulder as he’s standing on the ramp into the plane belly.

“Thanks,” he says, “for always having her back.”

That’s also patently untrue, so Chris sends him off with a curt nod and nothing more.

Honestly, it’s the last time Chris expects to interact with this particular issue so of course three days later at 11:00, he opens his door to find Ranger standing there on the other side. Looking at her is like looking straight at the edge of a naked knife. Her shoulders are slightly curled in, her hair is licking the top of her clavicle, and when his eyes drift to her left hand, he isn’t surprised at all to find it ringless. He opens the door and presses his back into it to let her through.

Even though the sun’s blazing outside, the inside of his apartment is dark. Ranger marches through it and he follows three steps behind. She’s wound tighter than wire past its breaking point. Chris doesn’t want to be collateral any more than he wants her to snap. And she’s clearly one touch away from both so he silently watches her settle onto the couch Leon spent the night on two days ago.

This, he thinks, is going to be a long fucking ride.

*

Ranger is –

Well.

Ranger was just about the most reliable thing on earth. She could be counted on like clockwork to get the missions done. There was a period of time when Chris had thought her a robot; unfeeling and entirely too rational. But then he started to notice the way she went arctic-cold sometimes and how that was different from her usual staidness. How she never referred to their previous comrades by name if they were infected as if drawing a clear line between comrade and BOW. The strange, soft but perfectly elucidated way she recited bearings. Chris used to fly those jets, but he remembers flinching when the air strike came down just as he remembers the perfect straightness of her back. It clicks instantly. Where Chris loses his temper, Ranger goes straight to the razor’s edge and stays there. She knuckles down with mission and objective and precision and uses that to ground her. It’s not that she doesn’t flame out, it’s just that stress makes her even more brutally efficient than before. Chris’s understanding of Ranger is instinctual, grounded in this fact: they’re polar opposites and, thus, perfect counterbalances.

It takes Chris two weeks in to figure out that Leon and Ranger haven’t had the Talk yet. When she’d shown up at Bragg, he had assumed the Talk had happened and things had gone south. Frankly, that was understandable. It’s one thing to hear your husband is cheating on you. It’s another entirely to hear that your husband has a long-standing relationship with someone who is directly responsible for at least 204 BSAA deaths, other war crimes notwithstanding.

Of course, Ranger doesn’t say this to him. But she spends seventeen hours over two days at the shooting range and Chris has to pick her up when the range safety officers won’t let her enter again. She has that far-away look in her eyes, the one that says she’s chasing the combat high but hasn’t found it yet. It’s not a hard conclusion for Chris to draw. True, he’d hoped for the outcome where they both managed to smooth things over and everything was back to status quo but Chris had always known the nuclear option was more likely. The smart thing to do would be to send Ranger off to psych and let them sort this out. Chris just went through that ringer, and his confidence in them is a tepid 0, so instead, he sets her up with the various arms HQ’s sent over and they run qualification trials all week.

After a full day of shooting, they sit together and debrief. Chris disassembles and reassembles the guns while Ranger watches. Her gaze sharpens. They talk about various armaments and how it’d be ideal to move to the larger 7.62×51mm NATO cartridges, how AP rounds might be required to pierce armor-type BOWS, and how the extra weight from the STANAGs is going to require some training changes. One week with Ranger gets Chris what would have taken the BSAA applications team a month to compile.

He knows all he’s doing is freezing her on that edge. But the only person who can bring her back down is who knows where doing who knows what. Chris has never been one to rely on others in his moments of great need. Still, he thinks that if the world could take Leon by the shoulders and shake some sense into him right this very moment, that would be very appreciated.

*

On a beautiful August day, Piers’ father comes to Fort Bragg.

He shakes Ranger’s hand and says: “Captain Kennedy, Piers spoke so highly of you.”

Chris is coming in from another hallway when this scene plays out in front of him and he feels like he’s watching a car crash in slowmo. It’s yet another time in his life where he is just a moment too late.

You see, Chris has specifically not mentioned Piers around Ranger. He had specifically walked a 50ft radius around the topic of Piers Nivans because that’s just one extremely large fault line. Ranger knows what happened, the events, the technical details, the recovery and confirmation; she wrote the report. She confirmed the remains they fished out of the ocean because Chris was too fucked up to do it. But the moment she sent it off in its sealed TOP SECRET file, she’d also locked Piers into a vault never to be opened again.

Remembering Piers in the present means remembering everything that has already happened. It means revisiting the past, playing through the scenes over and over again. It means revisiting truths that are all the more horrid without the blinding glare of adrenaline. It means ripping the wounds raw and packing them with salt.

Piers’ father is military too. He looks at Ranger’s standard issue face, the one all soldiers seem to plaster on when they’re receiving condolences. He gets it. He steps back and lets Chris corral him somewhere else before he can tell Ranger how much Piers had admired her, had wanted to be like her, how she was a shinning beacon to him – a symbol of everything he could be. Ranger’s smiling. Her posture is still like an iron rod but it’s obvious to anyone with eyes that the damage is done.

Things get worse from there. Chris is running out of technical minutiae to keep her occupied. The armory makes him sign off whenever she requests more rounds, as if wondering if it’s possible for a single person to blow through an entire unit’s worth of rounds. Qualification trials for the newest batch of BSAA ordinance had flown by in a blistering pace. Chris no longer had any illusions about why the brass had yanked Ranger out of the field and stuffed her behind a desk. Sure, they still bring her out when the mission requires something super high-speed like HALO, but anyone can be taught to jump from 35000 feet. Not everyone can just intuitively get _it_. Chris has no idea if this is a byproduct of her ranger training or whatever SOF school they put her through, but Ranger has an instinctive understanding of strategy and operations. When presented with the most hamstringed situation possible, she still somehow always finds the way out. Maybe that doesn’t sound so impressive to the civilian world but BSAA operatives, as a rule, either retire or die. Mortality’s cruising a low 78% these past three years. The fact that Ranger’s mere presence on the other side of a radio lowered that number made her irreplaceable.

Even though the directives from HQ are in big bold letters these days – “DO NOT LET RANGER REENLIST” and “DO NOT LET THE ARMY POACH HER” – Chris doesn’t know how exactly the brass expect him to achieve that. Every time they pass the black compound in Bragg, the SOF officers stare at Ranger like she’s some sort of golden calf. And right now, “Come back, we’ll put you back into the field right away” is getting more and more attractive, especially when the alternative Chris has to offer is “sit in this office and watch me fill out forms”. Chris knows this is unsustainable, but he also doesn’t know what he can do about it.

That’s his state of mind when he comes back to the apartment and sees Ranger washing face paint off in the kitchen sink. The black is smeared all over her hands. It’s running down her chin, black pigment encapsulated in water drops.

Chris thinks: fuck.

He’s never tried to walk through a scenario where Ranger snaps, not even after that bar trip with Leon. It’s simply not an event that required a contingency. That’s how much Chris has always relied on Ranger. There’s no use trying to map it out now; the look in her eyes says he’s going to find out real fucking soon.

When Ranger turns her face up and kisses him with an open mouth, the first thing Chris feels is relief.

By then he’s spent three days, seventy-two hours, vigilant and ready to wrestle a gun out of her hands before she could blow her brains out. Chris has gone on high alert every time Ranger had picked up anything sharper than a pen. He’s been ready to tackle her to the ground in case she thought to walk straight in front of the traffic. Chris does this for three days and is tired to his very bones. He has a newfound respect for Piers who had to babysit him for 3 months and all of Lanshiang, but then Piers had always been better than him. He had always been the perfect mix of Ranger and Chris.

It’s that thought that ultimately overrides Chris’ abstract guilt.

They’re polar opposites but that means they balance each other out. Chris is all fire and emotions; Ranger is all ice and logic. Someone else would have been able to find a better solution, but Chris is the only one here. He has no other ideas and no other options and sex can be like a fight. They’ve sparred repeatedly since she came down, but Ranger’s not going to be sated until she draws some real blood and she’s too fucking responsible to take a knife to Chris though she probably should. Maybe if she’d been given the chance to hurt him back after Edonia then things wouldn’t have come to this.

Ranger kisses him open-mouthed and it takes only a moment for Chris to make his decision.

When her teeth bite down, he kisses back.

Her mouth is hot. Hungry. Searching. Chris tries his best to answer. He doesn’t know what she’s looking for but he matches bite for bite, lick for lick, touch for touch. Blow for blow. Ranger grabs the side of his neck and Chris retaliates by shoving his knee between her legs. He isn’t even surprised when she grinds down. There’s no seduction in that movement, just a flash of canines, but it sets his blood on fire all the same. He can feel his heart hammering away in his neck and it's steadily rising with each touch.

It's amazing how familiar this all feels. How easily they fall into place, how second-nature it is to flip her, how well he knows the contours of her spine – maybe it’s true, that fighting isn’t too far removed from fucking. He knows she’s going to break skin, knows it like he knows she’ll cover his flank. He feels the edge of no return coming. It’s not too late to shove her away. If he were a more responsible man, he would.

Instead, he says, “Tell me to stop.”

Chris has never been the one with impeccable self-restraint. Ranger’s the hand at his side, the restraining bolt that keeps him under control, the cordon that prevents him from veering off a precipice. He jumps feet first and just trusts her to have his back – that’s how it’s always been. He knows that isn't true right now. Ranger can’t even hold herself together let alone keep Chris from fucking up, but the way she licks a hot stripe straight down his throat evaporates all higher thought.

His fingers are down the front of her pants. She’s wet enough to take him knuckle-deep without resistance, and answers his sudden intrusion by biting the meat of his shoulder. When she draws back, there’s a line of spit connecting them. Chris can barely see it in the darkness, but it gets him so hard he just stares. It’s only for a moment, but apparently even that is too long for Ranger. She grinds down on his fingers and smears slick all over his hand. Her own hand is drifting down his arm, making its way to his hip and Chris gets it.

He gets it. He doesn’t resist when Ranger’s leg curls over his hip, when she flips him and reverses their positions again. Not even when she climbs atop him, knees bracketing his thighs, and Chris knows she’s just going to impale herself like a fucking masochist -

She doesn’t howl. There’s no low moan, no animal growl, just the soft and unsteady rhythm of her breath. His hands settle on her hips and when she rises, he pulls her back down. He sets a rough pace, one without any consideration for the other party, but that seems to suit Ranger just fine. Even when she comes, she doesn’t make a sound. She just shudders down the full length of her spine. Chris feels it when she jerks around his cock. All it takes for him is three more thrusts and he has just enough presence of mind to spill across her back.

In the aftermath, there’s only silence. The front of his chest is all scratched up. It’s starting to welt over, but Ranger’s collapsed and pressed against him hip to hip so all he can see is a mop of hair and the slope of her shoulder. His hand is still resting on her hip but the touch is light, more a reminder that he’s here still. He hasn’t left. In the moonlight Ranger’s back looks flawless and white; untouched by violence of any kind. Chris feels his heart rate come back down. He can feel the sweat drying on his skin.

Ranger’s breathing is evening back out. When she’s asleep, he manages to slide her off. Her head narrowly misses landing on a pillow. Chris makes sure to pull the blanket up around her shoulders. Ranger is weak to the cold, but also, he’s not sure he can see her bare thigh and not immediately be consumed with self-loathing.

In the shower, Chris asks himself what Piers would have done. The answer comes easily: not this. Hot water sluices over his head and leaves a strip of his spine untouched. He can feel the stings from where Ranger’s broken skin and he leans into that stinging pain. Steam is filling the room. He presses his hand against the tile. Piers would have been able to handle this situation, and the one before, and the one before that, better. Chris has given it everything he’s got but it’s just not enough. There are times when he imagines a different present, maybe one where Piers had escaped with him from that underwater lab, or one where they’d never set foot down there at all. It doesn’t matter in the end. These thoughts circle back to the same place: Chris is the who should have died down there.

**Author's Note:**

> If Chris Redfield is your relationship councilor, then you've really fucked up somewhere along the way.
> 
> I really wrote this intending to explore Chris' POV on the post-Lanshiang state of Leon and Ranger's marriage ... basically, when the relationship is at its worst because he offers a different take on it. I feel like in _firing blanks_ this time period sort of comes off as "Ranger is Coping". Certainly, that's how Ranger feels and since its told from their POV, that makes sense! Ranger does indeed think they're coping. It's just Chris in the BG shaking his head 'no' and trying to do something about it (effects may vary).
> 
> Also, I wanted to write Actual Smut since we were all short changed of it previously but somehow at the end it turned into "look at how badly both Chris and Ranger are dealing with the general PTSD their lives inflict but also the very specific PTSD of Piers Dying". Which, like, yeah. If Ada Wong is the unseen presence haunting everything in _firing blanks_ then Piers is the forgone conclusion that backlights everything in this work.


End file.
